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Long Tail 28#

Instead of concentrating on blockbusters, the main bulk of revenues is generated through a 'long tail' of niche products. Individually, these neither demand high volumes, nor allow for a high margin. If a vast variety of these products are offered in sufficient amounts, the profits from resultant small sales can add up to a significant amount.


Apply this pattern to your own business and create your next innovative business model!

Examples: Iconic Cases

How they do it: CDnow, Inc. operated an online shopping website that sold compact discs and music-related products. In 1995, it already provided listings for over 100,000 music CD and cassette titles via its website.
Learn more about CDnow →

How they do it: On Steam, Valve’s game publishing platform, users can download (for free) or purchase access to 781 million different games, as of 2018. This includes large blockbuster titles, as well as very obscure games published by hobbyists. Most distinctly, a large portion of all games published on the platform (or, as much as 450 million games) were never downloaded or played. In 2018, Steam introduced a $100 fee for publishing a game on its platform, to curb abuse of the system.
Learn more about Valve Corporation →

How they do it: Nintendo offers a wide variety of games for its game consoles. The games are not necessarily developed from Nintendo itself but all need to be certified by Nintendo to run on the consoles. The large variety of games allow for targeting of different age groups and genres.
Learn more about Nintendo →

How they do it: By making their search engine universal and allow customers to look for anything in the internet, Google has become the leading search engine provider. It’s value proposition is to give customers exactly the search results they are looking for, no matter how small the niche. This leading market position supports itself as with a large enough customer group, the probability that someone has searched for a certain thing before increases.
Learn more about Google →

How they do it: Netflix offers a wide variety of content on its platform. This allows the company to target a broad audience as it is easy to make all the content available and let the user chose what to watch. This also includes niche content.
Learn more about Netflix →



Apply this pattern to your own business and create your next innovative business model!